Agent Vi Video Analytics Watch over UK Correctional Facility

Scott County Jail is a newly constructed facility that has been occupied since 2005. The facility covers 88,737 square feet, which includes 160 cells that house sentence and pretrial adult male and female offenders.

Juvenile delinquent offenders are also housed there for a limited time. The facility has a secure tunnel that connects the jail to the Scott County Justice Center, to provide for the efficient and safe movement of prisoners to and from court. In addition, there is a secure courtroom within the jail itself, which is used for initial arraignments.

Scott County Jail sought a real-time video analytics solution to assist in the detection of unauthorized people in restricted zones. Automatic detections are appropriate to serve the security needs of Scott County Jail due to the substantial size of the site, which otherwise would demand a large number of staff physically patrolling the restricted zones, or a corrections officer keeping watch and picking up irregularities on nearly 100 screens.

To allow for the effective deployment of the corrections staff following an incident, the jail sought a reliable analytics system that provides high probability of detection and low false alarm rates. Furthermore, it was of great importance to Scott County Jail that the video analytics be installed without having to make changes to their existing surveillance system.

Scott County Jail turned to Agent Vi to deploy real-time video analytics solution. Of 186 cameras at the site, the jail required the enabling of 90 cameras with video analytics capabilities.

The solution was installed at Scott County Jail, by embedding the component in the Axis encoders that stream video from the analog cameras. Agent Vi's distributed analytics architecture, which splits the video analysis between the camera and the server, enabled the use of a single analytics server to handle all 90 cameras. Accordingly, no additional hardware or equipment had to be purchased for the Milestone surveillance system to support video analytics.

In line with the security needs of Scott County Jail, all 90 encoders were defined with the required detection rules.

Scott County Jail employs Milestone VMS recording and viewing application, which is fully integrated with Agent Vi's software. This enables events generated by detections to be sent to Milestone's platform for display. Furthermore, the jail employs an additional storage component from Intransa which allows them to store substantial amounts of recorded video for a minimum of 30 days.

With 90 channels enabled with analytics software's real-time detection capabilities, corrections staff is alerted immediately to breaches of defined secure zones, allowing them to decide how to best respond to the incident. Such alerts have proven to be more effective than visual monitoring of screens in the master control station by corrections staff.

“The solution is an integral component of our surveillance system. Our corrections officers find the system easy to use. The response has been universally positive, and it increases officer efficiency,” said Captain Bonnie Case, Scott County Jail Administrator.

She also commented on the integration between video analytics and Milestone software, stating that “adding video analytics to our existing surveillance system has been seamless. We continue to use the central management of the video recording system to manage the surveillance network and receive event alerts in this interface.”

Paragon Solutions Group, a certified member of both Agent Vi's and Milestone's channel partner programs, installed the solution at the site. “We have had experience in the past with other analytics solutions and have always been disappointed. The analytics is easy to install, integrates well and provides our customers with the right solution based on the analytics and behaviors they require to effectively secure their location/assets,” said Todd Vojta, President of Paragon Solutions Group.